The Hot 11 Search Engine Marketing Articles of the Week! 7/12/13

People complain about the weather here in the Pacific Northwest, but there really is nothing better than a summer in Portland. All the people come out of their caves and sit on sidewalks drinking Mojitos; it’s a beautiful scene! But the weather isn’t the only thing that’s hot… these Search Engine Marketing Articles we’ve assembled for you are positively smoking! It’s the Hot 11 Articles of the Week from Amplify Interactive; all the best SEO, PPC, Social Media Marketing and Web Analytics Articles from the last week! Turn it up!

A great article that gives some tips on writing web copy that is compelling to users. You’ve got to know your value proposition and you’ve got to present it in a way that will get users to stop and notice… this kind of copywriting is more akin to creating a billboard for people driving by at 60 m.p.h. than it is to creating great literature. First you’ve got to cut through the noise and “sink the hook”, so to speak. This article includes four templates you can use to create a UVP, making this article truly worthy of inclusion in the Hot 11.

This is a good seed list of ideas to use when posting to social media. One of the biggest mistakes we see some companies make is only posting promotional tweets. Successful social media marketing involves being, well… social! It’s a conversational platform. It’s good practice to regularly post about things happening in your industry or community, to post about the people within your organization, and to interact with people. This article is a good seed list to start with; you could pick and choose which ones are relevant to you and continue to add to the list as the ideas come.

Instagram is introducing the ability to embed any public Instagram image on your own website. The pictures will clearly show who the content belongs to and will show an Instagram logo which, when clicked, will lead the user to your Instagram account where they can discover and like your other pictures. Cool, let’s give it a try! This is the first picture I saw when I opened my Instagram account, a photo from our own Ashley Kennedy commemorating the free Slurpee’s from 7-Eleven on 7/11:

In a recent study, Covario saw tablet Cost Per Click decline below desktop for the first time in several quarters, coming in 12% below desktop CPCs. Global CPCs have risen across all platforms. In other news, Yahoo-Bing continues to grow in PPC, but Google’s dominance remains unchallenged for now.

With Google constantly changing the algorithm, people are constantly looking for ways to achieve long lasting rankings that aren’t going to get them “penalized” later. The best way to achieve sustainable high rankings and relevant organic traffic is to understand what Google really wants at the top of its results pages. According to Cyrus Shepard, the #1 factor Google is looking for is user satisfaction. How would they be able to discern the satisfaction of a user with an algorithm you may ask? Well, if you enter a query then click on a link then come back to the search engine to click a different link or modify your query soon after, that’s a signal to Google that you were not satisfied with the result they served you. If that happens enough the algorithm would drop that pages rankings for the query. I hope that makes sense to you… go ahead and read the article. I think it’s a great one. This is smart marketing, and thus worthy of the “Hot 11″!

Go fill up a cup of coffee and plan to spend about an hour reading this article… or do what I did and skim through it reading the parts that pique your interest. This is a great article containing the opinions of several highly respected experts in the industry including Rand Fishkin, Aaron Wall, Will Critchlow and others. Google’s algo is constantly changing but the one constant is that they want quality results for users so that users will continue to use their product (and click on the PPC ads). Anyways, check this out!

To me, this article is interesting as much for examining how the content was created as is the content. Basically, the author took a bunch of concepts from Robert Cialdini’s oft-quoted marketing book “Influence” (a must read), added in a few extra psychological concepts, and added some value by explaining how you can use the concepts in marketing. This is a good way to create content, and a good way to leverage all that reading you do. Think about it; isn’t it true that the best way to learn is to teach? At the very least you are really forcing yourself to get clear on the concepts if you create some content based on a book or academic paper. This also creates value for your audience because you are taking complicated concepts and distilling them to their essence, then giving your readers the chance to explore the subject further by linking to your source material. Love it!

As for the content of this post, these are indeed some good concepts to know if you are a marketer. I’d even go so far as to say crucial.

I love these articles from Copyblogger. I guess that’s because I love content consulting for B2B companies, and one of the core competencies of that role is headline writing. This article talks about how you really have to know whom you are targeting with your content. Don’t try and write for everyone… speak to one pain that your product or article soothes perfectly and tell your reader how you soothe that pain in a clear, concise, and compelling manner. It all starts with really knowing your audience. Not just knowing their job titles, but knowing their pain.

Another cool piece of content that takes something that already exists (the consumer pathway, a basic marketing concept) and adds value by giving you ideas about marketing for each step in the pathway (or funnel). Use these ideas as a seed list when planning a social strategy. To be honest, the writing really needs to be whittled down in this post… it’s too verbose. Anyways, the point is to collect a bunch of marketing ideas and tie them to different stages of the consumer path so that you take care of your customer from awareness to advocacy. There are some really good ideas here, but I bet you can come up with some better ones based on the specifics of your business. By the way (warning, self promotion coming) let us know if you’d like some help with that!

Much like Russian dolls, match types nest inside of each other. In this blog post, Amanda explores the ins and outs of phrase and modified broad match types, as they are two of the most confused and cross-polluting match types. At the end of reading this article, you’ll have a much clearer idea of how to go about your match type strategy!

Google Analytics provides a helpful report called New vs Returning. This post explains all about what this data is, when to use it and how to get the most from it. With this data you can start to understand your users a whole lot better!

About Brent Baltzer

Brent Baltzer is a Junior Account Manager at Add3, a search engine marketing agency with offices in Portland & Seattle. Brent would love to connect with you on Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter (@brentbaltzer)!